Comics Depressing Quotes

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, COFFEE and acceptance…The SIX stages of waking up!!

Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things there will be waves of terrible sadness, which last sometimes for days; irritation, insensibility, etc., etc., which taken together form a melancholy. Now, painful as it is, this is sent to us for an enlightenment. It always passes off, and we learn about life from it, and we ought to learn a great many good things if we react on it right. (For instance, you learn how good a thing your home is, and your country, and your brothers, and you may learn to be more considerate of other people, who, you now learn, may have their inner weaknesses and sufferings, too.) Many persons take a kind of sickly delight in hugging it; and some sentimental ones may even be proud of it, as showing a fine sorrowful kind of sensibility. Such persons make a regular habit of the luxury of woe. That is the worst possible reaction on it. It is usually a sort of disease, when we get it strong, arising from the organism having generated some poison in the blood; and we mustn't submit to it an hour longer than we can help, but jump at every chance to attend to anything cheerful or comic or take part in anything active that will divert us from our mean, pining inward state of feeling. When it passes off, as I said, we know more than we did before. And we must try to make it last as short as time as possible. The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make something ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self.

After the stock market crash, some New York editors suggested that hearings be held: what had really caused the Depression? They were held in Washington. In retrospect, they make the finest comic reading. The leading industrialists and bankers testified. They hadn’t the foggiest notion what had gone bad. You read a transcript of that record today with amazement: that they could be so unaware. This was their business, yet they didn’t understand the operation of the economy. The only good witnesses were the college professors, who enjoyed a bad reputation in those years. No professor was supposed to know anything practical about the economy.

The depressing majority of comics seem to be about violence of one sort or another, [...] And I just don’t enjoy violence. I can see that narratively it is often a powerful spike in a story, but I certainly don’t want to dwell on it. I don’t want it in my real life, I don’t find violence entertaining in and of itself, or exciting, or funny. But sex is happily part of most people’s lives, and crosses the mind most days, I would say, even if it’s just watching your partner get out of bed in the morning. [...] Most pornography is pretty awful. I mean, it does the job at the most utilitarian level, but it rarely excites other areas of the mind, or the eye. It’s repetitive, bland and often a bit silly. I was interested in trying to do something that has an aesthetic beauty to it if possible, and something that tickles the intellect as well as the more basic areas of the mind. Maybe that’s not possible, and as soon as you start to think too much, it stops working as pornography. I don’t think so, but I guess it’s in the eye and mind of the viewer.

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you—every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he italicizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life.

Experts say that the movie King Kong (1933) released the pent-up rage of the Great Depression. Well, COVID-19 Halloween displays could do the same for our feelings about the 2020 lockdown.

In Mexico, I first encountered the attitude that was missing from the optimistic sense of living in the United States: a tragic sense of life. Such a sense doesn’t force us into a somber cone of depression and futility; it urges the opposite. The tragic sense opens a human being to the exuberant joys of the present. To laughter, carnal ity, the comical varieties of love, to music and art, to the small human glories of the day.

He never looks at comics these days, even though they’ve become fashionable to the point where adults are allowed to read them without fear of ridicule. Ironically, in David’s view, this makes them a lot more ridiculous than when they were intended as a perfectly legitimate and often beautifully crafted means of entertaining kids. At age thirteen, David’s idea of heaven was somewhere that comics were acclaimed and readily available, perhaps with dozens of big budget movies featuring his favourite obscure costumed characters. Now that he’s in his fifties and his paradise is all around him he finds it depressing. Concepts and ideas meant for the children of some forty years ago: is that the best that the twenty-first century has got to offer? When all this extraordinary stuff is happening everywhere, are Stan Lee’s post-war fantasies of white neurotic middle-class American empowerment really the most adequate response?

The point was driven home for him when pizza magnate Herman Cain had spent a not-inconsiderable period of time at the top of the Republican primary polls. Herman Cain! Part of him found the whole thing amusing—but then he pictured actually running for president and somehow trailing a comic-relief candidate like that, and the thought just depressed him.

Do you still think like that? The exit-strategy thing,” she asks. “Sort of, I guess? It’s different now; it’s not urgent like it used to be. It’s more like a habit, if that makes sense?” I glance at her face. “You know how some people go to movie theaters and have to find all the emergency exits, or they go out to eat and have to face the door no matter what, and half the time they don’t even realize they’re doing it?” She nods, but kind of slowly, hesitant. “That’s how it is, just like a glitch in the comfort matrix or something. Something my brain tosses out there, and I’m like, ‘Cool, thanks for the suggestion, but maybe we could just play a video game instead.’ It’s just crossed lines. It’s fine.

It’s hard for me to read Weirdo and a lot of those magazines; it’s always depressing for me to read these guys writing about how they’re so depressed and they can’t get laid. After a while, it really gets on my nerves. There’s something about it that makes me think it’s just this club of really fucked-up dudes [laughs] — Weirdo especially — and after a while, I just didn’t want to read it any more. I was not interested in that viewpoint; it just made me feel bad and made me feel that these were people I didn’t ever want to know.

Yes," she said, "but I am depressed by the awfulness of it all. I feel of so little consequence—so small and helpless in the face of all these myriad manifestations of life stripped to the bone of its savagery and brutality. I realize as never before how cheap and valueless a thing is life. Life seems a joke, a cruel, grim joke. You are a laughable incident or a terrifying one as you happen to be less powerful or more powerful than some other form of life which crosses your path; but as a rule you are of no moment whatsoever to anything but yourself. You are a comic little figure, hopping from the cradle to the grave. Yes, that is our trouble—we take ourselves too seriously; but Caprona should be a sure cure for that." She paused and laughed.

When we peek behind the grinning mask of comic cynicism, we find a frustrated idealist. The comic sensibility wants the world to be perfect, but when it looks around, it finds greed, corruption, lunacy. The result is an angry and depressed artist. If you doubt that, ask one over for dinner. Every host in Hollywood has made that mistake: "Let's invite some comedy writers to the party! That'll brighten things up." Sure...till the paramedics arrive.

[....] I know that might never happen, but I have this daydream where, a couple of years from now, when I'm gone and Mike misses me, he reaches for the comic book, and as he reads it, he feels better. He feels safe. He knows he can beat his demons in exactly the way I couldn't

Her remark laid bare not only the reality - not enough comic opportunities for women in Hollywood - but also the ideology that created and perpetuated that reality. It was right there in the sentence structure, easily parsed: 'All the scripts are for men and you play 'the girl'' suggests that the scripts were handed down by the clean, white hand of God. It banished 'the girl' to the sidelines to perform her girly insignificance on command. It was right there in the dismissive way her comment was received as clickbait all over the Internet. 'Borat's Babe Plans a Hollywood Sex Revolution,' one headline announced, not only missing the point but mocking and dismissing it. Women's experience in its entirety seemed contained in that remark, not to mention several of the stages of feminist grief: the shock of waking up to the fact that the world does not also belong to you; the shame at having been so naive as to have thought it did; the indignation, depression, and despair that follow this realization; and, finally, the marshaling of the handy coping mechanisms, compartmentalization, pragmatism, and diminished expectations.

The public schools in my neighborhood were shit so I had to go Graland Country Day School, a neo-Fascist lacrosse factory in the form of a K–9, a place so pretentious it actually existed in a neighborhood called Hilltop. At Graland the progeny of emotionally distant businessmen and their manic-depressive trophy wives gathered on a daily basis to perfect their pronunciation of the word “faggot” while sowing the seeds of future opiate addictions.

No art is worth endangering your health and well-being.

Perhaps it was that the idea of a Ministry of Information was alien to us after our free Press, but everything done by this new Ministry seemed very comic. We British do not like scraps of advice and information handed out to us as pamphlets. We like to read them in the paper which we choose to read. I stuck the pamphlet on the wall and it never failed to amuse me when I was depressed

I’m so depressed today. I just found out this ‘death thing’ applies to me.

When we peek behind the grinning mask of comic cynicism, we find a frustrated idealist. The comic sensibility wants the world to be perfect, but when it looks around, it finds greed, corruption, lunacy. The result is an angry and depressed artist. If you doubt that, ask one over for dinner. Every host in Hollywood has made that mistake: “Let’s invite some comedy writers to the party! That’ll brighten things up.” Sure… till the paramedics arrive. These angry idealists, however, know that if they lecture the world about what a rotten place it is, no one will listen. But if they trivialize the exalted, pull the trousers down on snobbery, if they expose society for its tyranny, folly, and greed, and get people to laugh, then maybe things will change. Or balance. So God bless comedy writers. What would life be like without them?

In the past, perhaps because of memories of the depression in the 1930s and early 1940s when most people had nothing, the greatest generation and the younger Baby Boomers grew up accumulating stuff. It probably started with functional stuff like furniture, kitchenware, and clothing (and shoes!) Later, it expanded into collections of useless but art-driven stuff like coins, postage stamps, and records. During World War II, there were paper drives to create the recyclable pulp that could be used to support the war effort, and millions of magazines and comic books were completely destroyed every week. It wasn’t until the war ended that people started collecting and keeping books and comics and magazines. As George Carlin observed, we then had to build bigger and bigger homes to put all our accumulating stuff into.